NYC day 10

A reassuringly typical Saturday: I did my long run (90 as 3:1, with virtually no soreness in problem area of lower back/hip/glute/R posterior chain - still can't get over the near-magical efficacy of just putting a second orthotic in left shoe to counter leg length discrepancy), got into bed with my copy of Clarissa and promptly went to sleep for two hours. Haven't read as many pages as I'd intended to, but that's fine.

I was somewhat unsettled last night by the all-pervasive sound of sirens - I always hear them, I'm only about two and a half blocks from St. Luke's Roosevelt, but with so little other traffic and more covid-19 cases arriving in ambulances, it was pretty dramatic, and again when I woke up in the night for an hour or so.

Comfort reading recs #3 and 4. Two novels about music and dysfunctional families and love: Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows and James Baldwin's Just Above My Head. Really these are two of my absolute all-time favorites, and I am due for a reread on the Baldwin. Interesting to me that Baldwin and West are in some sense most admired for their nonfiction - Baldwin of course is much superior to West as a serious novelist, she didn't write another one that's really up to the standard of this. I contemplated adding a third rec here, Richard Powers' The Time of Our Singing; it's my favorite novel of his, I do really love it, but I think it may be more of a niche book than the other two.

Catch-up

Huge pang as I finished rereading Faithful Place (which I think is the most formally perfect of the four, though each has its own particular appeal) - no more Tana French books!  However fortunately I was able to plunge straight into Megan Abbott's superb Dare Me, which I loved, and it was a natural progression from that to a book I've been meaning to read for ages, Rebecca Godfrey's Under the Bridge.

Dental woes continue - the right lower jaw is still surprisingly painful, and I have another appointment on Wednesday - but physical therapy has worked wonders for my back, which is largely though not entirely better.  I'm only in New York through Sunday, then in Cayman for two weeks - will be working mostly on the style book, I think, though I'll take a few long novels to read with a view to contemplating ABCs of the novel....

Catch-up

I have been working pretty much at capacity; I had to sort of just skip my birthday on Saturday, it would have been too disruptive to switch over to human contact mode!  Finished my last-hundred-pages-from-third-to-first-person rewrite by midday Monday, got a round of comments by the end of the day and sent off a next version a few hours ago.  Will have one more chunk of work on it again tomorrow.  I know the ending isn't quite right, I have a tack to pursue...

I'm finding True Believers slow going; it feels too long, and the voice is unpersuasive in certain respects.  Impatient to get to the big reveal, but not so much so that I don't keep on putting it aside in search of a more immersive read!  It is locally enjoyable but cumulatively puzzling.

Lydia Netzer's Shine Shine Shine is just a hair too whimsical to be perfectly suited to my tastes, but I thought it was excellent: it definitely lives up to the advance hype.  Cheryl Strayed's Wild is also very immersive, though it seems to me that it's a good book because she's an interesting person rather than because of anything about the writing as such.  (It caused me to think with nostalgia for two other memoirs of self-examination and pilgrimage I have read recently that are written by people who clearly think much more as I do about life, the universe and everything, namely Tim Parks's Teach Us to Sit Still and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction!)  Strayed's book has interesting things in common with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water; I gather they are both in the same writing group, it would be an odd experience to be workshopping drafts with someone who had so much in common with oneself.  I am not sure it would be entirely enjoyable!  Other obvious comparables for Strayed would be Elizabeth Gilbert and Alice Sebold, whose memoir Lucky deserves the widest acclaim.

Then the other night when I truly was in the pit of absolute fatigue I downloaded and reread The Hobbit.  I have a stronger attachment to this book than to the Lord of the Rings trilogy as such; as a very small child, I had The Golden Treasury of Children's Literature, and I believe this was where I first encountered an excerpt from Tolkien's novel, though I don't have the volume to hand to check.  The narrative voice is perhaps less capably rendered than Lewis's in the Narnia books, but it is a delightful book regardless.

Tonight I am going to the theater with G. (we're seeing this).  We will undoubtedly have a good dinner afterwards, which will be a welcome reprieve from excessive computer time!  My back was doing quite a bit better, after swearing off yoga and boot camp, but I had a physical therapy appointment yesterday that has totally done it in.   That is counterintuitive...

Closing tabs:

Margaret Mahy has died.  (Read The Changeover if you don't know it already.)

Interview with a very young Neil Gaiman.